Hello everyone!

My name is Celina DiPietro and I am currently a rising senior at Point Park University studying Information Technology. The purpose of this blog is to reflect on my Co-op this summer with the company Othot. Othot is a software company that uses predictive analytics to help companies gain valuable insights on their data. My job title here is “Data Scientist” and my main focus is analyzing data sets and seeing what variables would be most useful for the model.

My first week here at Othot has been great! This is my first “real job” experience with my major. I can already tell from my first week that I am going to learn a lot. The first couple days here were basically getting my computer set up for the database, getting introduced to the data sets, and walking through a number of algorithms that are applied to the scripts. After day one which was mainly the on boarding process, I dove right into the data sets. On days two and three, I focused most of my time on studying scripts and algorithms to help further understand their purpose. I had guidance from my superiors whenever I had any type of question which was very helpful. Also, my Business Analytics class that I took at Point Park in the fall term has me prepared for this job. Clustering, K-means, Logistic Regression, and Confusion Matrix, are just some of the terms I have heard come up in conversations here. These are all topics that were covered in the course. I have been writing a lot in .json format which is something new to me, but I was able to pick up quick on through lots of practice.

Every Thursday, I have to send a weekly status report to the Director of Operations touching on what I worked on this week, any significant accomplishments, and what you plan to work on this week. I like this because I am able to keep track of my progress throughout this Co-op term.

On every Friday, there is an Intern Stand-Up meeting which was something brand new to me. In this type of meeting, we all stand in a circle and touch upon on what each other has been working on this week to see how it all fits together. It is very brief and to the point which makes it much more efficient. Once a month there is also a company meeting, and it fell on the 20th. During this type of meeting, we had food provided (Yes!), and each department went through what they are working on to let each team know their progress. I found this meeting very informative and let me learn more on what each team member does.

Each week for the Co-op, I also have to give myself a quality of performance rating (1 being poor and 5 being outstanding performance)

I give the quality of my performance this week a 4. I am still learning the swing of things and really applying myself to what I am doing. This is something brand new for me, and I am trying my best learn as fast as I can. The help I have is tremendous and I can tell I will have a great experience here. There is also a number of new interns here that are going through the same experiences as me which makes me feel for comfortable. Next week, I plan to apply my knowledge from the first week more efficiently, and work on writing my scripts with the new data set.

I am looking forward too all of the things I will learn from this Co-op, and also what I can help Othot with!